Did anyone else notice this with story jobs?

[Bunna]

Whenever I get a job to build or upgrade a PC, I tend to use the best parts available to me for the customer's budget. This, of course, also happens when I do story jobs. But because you get the PC you built back, where the email says you have x budget, it seems that, when you build PCs like I do, that it is impossible to complete the job without going over budget. This happened to me three times already and so I waited for the part I needed to pop up on PC-bay, so I could get them cheaper. Just out of curiosity, I tried completing a story job like I normally do, and guess what: I went way over budget, but still I received a five star rating. I really like this concept, because you can only get five stars when you do the job properly. However, I think this may need to be conyed to users, because the budget given in the customer email in the story missions is static and not dynamic.
This is my opinion, I'd really like to hear what you have to say to this.
By the way, please save before trying this if you would like to do so. I have only tried this once.

[🦊Λℚ𝓤ΛƑΛᗯҜᔕ🦊]

Yep I have noticed that and I have (repeatedly) tried to tell many people that "Over building" any customer's job in PCBS is a very bad idea and it will often result in you unable to complete said job later in the game. You should never ever "over build" anything. To ensure you are able to always complete all jobs you should only give customers the bare minimum required to complete their objectives in career mode.

[BonPadre]

All this OP is part of the history of the game developpement, and the fact the dev team is still a small team.

Back in the days of early access, the budget was a whole different animal, as you were paied a fixed amount, no matter how much money you used to build / repair / upgrade, and if it was used parts or brand new parts.

So if you had a budget of $1300 and you could meet the request spending only $700, you would then have earned $600.
If there was a request to reach a benchmark score, with a budget of $450 to buy a new GPU, and you could reach said score only by OC the customer's original parts, then you would have earned a flat $450.

As you can imagine then, back in the days, the "meta" was to build as minimalistic to reach the request, as you would earn more money (note that the used PC's selling through PCBay was NOT existing at the time)

Later, near full release, the devs reworked the budget thing, splitting the parts and the labour. Now you earn money only on the labour, as parts are paied what you effectively install. So, no more earning through parts.

And yet, at some point, it wasn't much of an issue, as overall budget was still near the old ones, so it was not much possible to overbuild by much.

But ofc... cries and begging to have larger budgets happened, and devs went over the board with how much they upped budgets...
But ofc, at the same time, they are truely not willing to rewrite and correct the story jobbs, which are hard scripted.

And now you face your situation.
So to avoid any issues, best advice on all story jobs is exactly the one Aquafawks gave you.
I'll add more tips you should follow on story jobs (the ones with detailed mails and where customers come back to you)

- Always buiild in medium to large towers, so you can always add parts like a second GPU or more HDD if requested.
- Never ever take out inner parts, like HDD drive bays, just because you want to be nice and install an AIO, because the customer is cool... What will happen if you can't add later a HDD because the AIO is customer tagged, and you can't fit it anywhere else than where you had to remove drive bay ?
- Never build on some weird "exotic" cases nor mini / micro cases, because maybe you will not be able to fit a bigger GPU if a request comes with "can I have a better GPU ?"
- Keep used parts, don't sell them, some story mission will require you to actually have used parts, if you want to keep within budget (though as you have seen by yourself, you can go over budget on story jobs... lazy workaround by devs to solve the budget issue they created by making them way too large)

BUT have as much fun to ovebuild in all RNG jobs, as you will never see those PC's again, use the smaller cases and exotic cases there.

Anyway, sorry for long post, but it's part of the developpement history of the game.

Not a fan of how it went... it made all the jobs way too easy and almost useless to calculate anything (or even just guesstimate the price, and maybe having to order again a few cheaper parts, just to be able to fit budget...)

Anyways, happy gaming during those hollidays.

[Bunna]

Originally posted by BonPadre:

Back in the days of early access, the budget was a whole different animal, as you were paied a fixed amount, no matter how much money you used to build / repair / upgrade, and if it was used parts or brand new parts.

Originally posted by BonPadre:

Later, near full release, the devs reworked the budget thing, splitting the parts and the labour. Now you earn money only on the labour, as parts are paied what you effectively install. So, no more earning through parts.

I actually prefer this system of budgeting as I sadly had some problems with the old system, especially when you have to reach a specific score and went just shy of it, purchasing far too many parts trying to reach the score. I don't really remember if there were some unprofitable jobs back then. Maybe it was just because I didn't have the experience needed...

Originally posted by Aquafawks:

Yep I have noticed that and I have (repeatedly) tried to tell many people that "Over building" any customer's job in PCBS is a very bad idea and it will often result in you unable to complete said job later in the game. You should never ever "over build" anything. To ensure you are able to always complete all jobs you should only give customers the bare minimum required to complete their objectives in career mode.

Originally posted by BonPadre:

So to avoid any issues, best advice on all story jobs is exactly the one Aquafawks gave you.
I'll add more tips you should follow on story jobs (the ones with detailed mails and where customers come back to you)

This post was actually not concerning overbuilding story jobs, it was about the fact that you can
complete those even when going over budget , I did not have any problems with completing them with a five star review. I wanted to express my concern that this isn't conveyed to the player as you only get to see the static budget of whatever the game gives you, not a dynamic one.

I still remember that I had this one job back in the day, I spent far too much money purchasing CPUs and GPUs, trying to reach the requested score. It was kind of fun though.

Originally posted by BonPadre:

But ofc... cries and begging to have larger budgets happened, and devs went over the board with how much they upped budgets...

Well, it's not too late. Maybe we'll see some more balancing in the game's future. The career is not perfect in my opinion, but this my be the same like with the old career jobs: Trial and error.

Thank you both for your help. Happy gaming to both of you.

[BonPadre]

Originally posted by Bunna:

This post was actually not concerning overbuilding story jobs, it was about the fact that you can
complete those even when going over budget , I did not have any problems with completing them with a five star review. I wanted to express my concern that this isn't conveyed to the player as you only get to see the static budget of whatever the game gives you, not a dynamic one.

I can only agree with you, as I hate too that way of "fixing" issues by a lazy workaround, instead of going back to coding and doing it properly.

But again, that game mechanic is just a reaction from devs due to upping the budgets. Which allowed you to go "overbuilding" mode.
Then players complained that it was a bug that you took a hit on ratings by going over budgets on story jobs, while the game always allowed you to actually reject jobs, and thus players had a way to check before accepting... and had a decision point...

Unfortunately, to many players, it seems that there should not even be an accept button, as they auto-accept all jobs not checking if it's doable within budget.

So all the situation and your concern is only due to history of the game's developpement steps, and the changes. That's why I took time to describe it all, noit knowing if you were a new player or an older player

[Spoopy Owl]

yeah, at this point for me personally, i've started auto rejecting any jobs that come up saying something like "Meet X Benchmark score" I hate them so much. I'm also very picky about upgrade jobs, tho i do feel even with RNG, they aren't going ot give you an "Upgrade GPU" job, without being able to actually buy a part that is an upgrade...

[🦊Λℚ𝓤ΛƑΛᗯҜᔕ🦊]

Originally posted by A Sassy Dragon:

yeah, at this point for me personally, i've started auto rejecting any jobs that come up saying something like "Meet X Benchmark score" I hate them so much. I'm also very picky about upgrade jobs, tho i do feel even with RNG, they aren't going ot give you an "Upgrade GPU" job, without being able to actually buy a part that is an upgrade...

You're missing out on a big portion of the game then. I have noticed 3dmark jobs reward more experience than other jobs. Also with a little creativity and using 3rd party tools posted in the forums here all 3dmark jobs are trivial and easy. People have created tools for us that will tell you exactly which hardware to buy to meet the exact 3dmark score without even thinking about it. Plus later in the game when you unlock overclocking you can sometimes complete some 3dmark jobs 100% completely for free just by overclocking their components. Overclocking really is a lot of fun too.

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

Another issue with story job for some old fossil who wanted PC for chat, they returned wanting 32 GB of RAM, ok then, granted and then they returned wanting i7-7700K CPU... month before i7-7700K actually became available and by that time the job expired.
Thought the jobs only ask you for components that are actually available to you...

[Bunna]

Originally posted by Rumpelcrutchskin:

Another issue with story job for some old fossil who wanted PC for chat, they returned wanting 32 GB of RAM, ok then, granted and then they returned wanting i7-7700K CPU... month before i7-7700K actually became available and by that time the job expired.
Thought the jobs only ask you for components that are actually available to you...

This happens in some story jobs I've seen. Because most of them aren't time limited, this is not a problem. I haven't seen this with regular jobs yet.

[BonPadre]

Originally posted by Rumpelcrutchskin:

and then they returned wanting i7-7700K CPU... month before i7-7700K actually became available and by that time the job expired.
Thought the jobs only ask you for components that are actually available to you...

On story jobs, there are usually no deadline, which means, you can keep the PC for WEEKS before returning it to customer, but you must ACCEPT the job.
If you don't accept the job, then indeed the mail will expire.

[impetus_maximus]

not sure how much has changed since this has been posted... i had a job that had a $1300 budget to run an application at recommended specs. doing it well under budget i got a 3 star review.

would getting the best bang:buck value parts maxing out the budget net me 5 stars?

[edit] i forgot to use a segate HD. then i got 4 stars

[PUC_Snakeman]

You forgot something else, and missed a star too. Like if they said "I need this done quickly", that means you get only 1 day from when the PC is in your hands, else you lose that star.

[🦊Λℚ𝓤ΛƑΛᗯҜᔕ🦊]

Originally posted by PUC_Snakeman:

You forgot something else, and missed a star too. Like if they said "I need this done quickly", that means you get only 1 day from when the PC is in your hands, else you lose that star.

Fortunately no one actually needs to maintain a 5 star rating in this game. 4-star is the minimum to access all jobs in the game and they got that so they're fine.

[PUC_Snakeman]

Okay. But there are some people, like me, who want to get 5 stars every time. :) Best thing to do is create a new save before clicking Collect, and then reload as needed to get 5 stars. And if you're still confused, share the save file, and we'll help figure it out.

[impetus_maximus]

thanks Snakeman

[PUC_Snakeman]

You're welcome. Good luck!